The Saddest Summer of Samuel S Page 6
“Herr S.”
“Was ist Doc.”
“I would prefer if you did not speak German to me. Herr patient.”
“Hold it, something’s wrong Doc.”
“Yes Herr patient.”
“Maybe you heard I’m organising a union of patients for lower fees. Heh heh.”
“What I’m going to tell you Herr patient is something I do not want you to misunderstand. You are an extremely intelligent man and I do not think you will.”
“I am listening Herr Doc. What’s your problem.”
“Herr S you are driving me nuts.”
“Whoa.”
“A sign that you are well and truly cured.”
“Wait Doc.”
“Please. If you will. This hour is free with my compliments. Therefore I should like to continue.”
“What are you going to do with all my money you’ve got.”
“Herr S you well know over these five years my fees have gone up and yours has not.”
“True. But what Doc do you do with the money.”
“Herr patient may I suggest that that is my business.”
“Well it keeps me awake and agonises me and if I knew it would help that’s all.”
“I invest it.”
“In what.”
“Please Herr S, I’ve answered your question.”
“No you haven’t.”
“What is the difference what it’s invested in.”
“Well if it makes no difference why not tell me.”
“I invest it in manufacturing.”
“Manufacturing what.”
“Chemical products.”
“What chemical products.”
“I think perhaps our session is over Herr S.”
“No it isn’t. I want to know what you’ve put my money in. Or I’m sitting right here until I do.”
“Very well Herr S. I invest in oral contraception and munitions.”
“O.K.”
“Does it answer your question.”
“Yup.”
“I am glad to hear that.”
“Well Doc you’re really going to miss my shooting the shit to you. You’re smart to kick me out into the cold world. Three more months of me and you would be sitting there a salt pillar.”
“Perhaps Herr S.”
Samuel S in his chair his hands spread out on the leather arms. While still here he was here forever. And all the silence now listening to the Herr Doctor’s watch tick costs nothing at all. To go to sleep. While he is still there on the other side of the desk. A punching bag. A pillar of salt. To break my fists. A last hour after hundreds. And this one free. Like a beer back in the States, it’s on the house, buddy. The glass that tastes best of all. For which you almost wait through all the others. And this final session given me the biggest insight of all. That if ever I’m cured I will never know it.
“So long Doc.”
“Goodbye Herr S.”
Samuel S launching himself upright. Herr Doctor standing. Behind him the window and below the sound of the little girl blowing her whistle. Herr Doctor rubbing his thumb in his fingers. Means he wants to shake hands. Against my principles. All the feelings I’ve hurt. To begin things with a handshake when you know later they will be crawling up to clutch you around the neck.
“Doc, one thing before I go out this door the last time. Do you ever think you’ll be cured.”
“No Herr S.”
“Doc you won’t believe this but you’re a good guy. Thanks anyway for what you tried to do.”
“Herr S I will voluntarily express an opinion. You are a strange person. And it is a pity you would turn me into a pillar of salt, for I could listen to you much longer.”
On the street all bravery dying in the chill of summer rain landing on the heart. A throb in the emblem of teeth on the thigh. Tears welling in Samuel S’s eyes. Moving slowly away. Forty steps he counted and in a great heave of the spirit he broke. Shoulders folded like wings and clutching his face with hands he lay against the corner of a doorway. Dream untold. Of seeing Abigail and Catherine off on a train. Helping to pile their luggage. Like a gentleman. And then he got Catherine. All her big fat piece of her. Slamming it in all the way to the horizon. And then turning. To see entering the station. Two figures. One dark, one light. One the Countess the other, Herr Doctor. And as they passed, porters lugging their white elegant cases, he was crushed up against the train’s wheels. And then he was dying and you think that you don’t want your friends to know you died screaming in pain but that you were brave, kept your mouth shut and said nothing at all.
Like
A summer fly
Waltzes out
And wobbles
In the winter.
About the Author
J. P. DONLEAVY was born in New York City in 1926 and educated there and at Trinity College, Dublin. He is the author of six novels, The Ginger Man, A Singular Man, The Saddest Summer of Samuel S, The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, The Onion Eaters, and A Fairy Tale of New York; a collection of stories, Meet My Maker the Mad Molecule; and a volume, The Plays of J. P. Donleavy, With a Preface by the Author. The plays included are The Ginger Man, Fairy Tales of New York, A Singular Man, and The Saddest Summer of Samuel S. Mr. Donleavy currently makes his home in Ireland on the shores of Lough Owel.
BOOKS BY J. P. DONLEAVY
Novels
THE GINGER MAN
A SINGULAR MAN
THE SADDEST SUMMER OF SAMUEL S
THE BEASTLY BEATITUDES OF BALTHAZAR B
THE ONION EATERS
A FAIRY TALE OF NEW YORK
Plays
THE GINGER MAN
FAIRY TALES OF NEW YORK
A SINGULAR MAN
THE SADDEST SUMMER OF SAMUEL S
Stories
MEET MY MAKER THE MAD MOLECULE
General
THE UNEXPURGATED CODE
A Complete Manual of Survival & Manners
Copyright
First e-book digital edition
published 2011 by
THE LILLIPUT PRESS
62–63 Sitric Road, Arbour Hill Dublin 7, Ireland
www.lilliputpress.ie
Copyright © J.P. Donleavy, 2011
ISBN 978 1 84351 207 3
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher.
The Lilliput Press receives financial assistance from An Chomhairle Ealaíon / The Arts Council of Ireland.
THE BEASTLY BEATITUDES OF BALTHAZAR B
J. P. Donleavy
“You’ll want to read BALTHAZAR B. It’ll make you laugh and cry. The story is simple. A wealthy young Frenchman of Irish ancestry is born in Paris, schooled in England and at Trinity College, Dublin, married and separated in London. He begins and remains shy and gentle. He seeks love. It proves elusive, even harder to keep than to find. Neither the meek nor the arrogant inherit the earth in Donleavy’s cosmos. While all possess it, none can keep it. In laughing or weeping over this poor little rich boy we really laugh and weep not for Balthazar but for ourselves.”
—SATURDAY REVIEW
“Incident upon hilarious, marvellously invented incident—encounters, disportings, disappointments, scenes of domestic life and strife, sexual spectaculars, small joys and further sadnesses. It is Donleavy at his best …”
—NEWSWEEK
“Revelatory, delightful and sometimes very poignant, this romp of a novel is lush and lovely, bawdy and sad … the stuff of the passions and dreams of being alive.”
—THE NEW YORK TIMES
“Donleavy is capable of making the heterosexual act seem as lyrical and as blessed as it sometimes is in reality.”
—LIFE MAGAZINE
“While the overall tone of the book is tragic and almost elegiac, the individual scenes are often hilarious … unmatched in literature for comic ferocity.”
—TIME MAGAZINE
“Genui
ne and touching … J. P. Donleavy is, I think, one of the most accomplished and original writers of our time, and BALTHAZAR B belongs with his best.”
—JOSEPH HELLER
“One of the few really great writers we have.”
—THE NEW LEADER
In hardcover: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence $7.95
In paperback: A Dell/Laurel Edition $1.50
A FAIRY TALE OF NEW YORK
J. P. Donleavy
“A FAIRY TALE OF NEW YORK is provisioned with the malign Niebelungen of our urban land: power jobbers, sexual self-destructs, Kamikaze eccentrics. It’s about social impotence and despair … Donleavy’s thunderous superb humor has the efficacy of grace. It heals and conquers and ratifies. J. P. Donleavy is a writer of explosive, winning imagination.”
—THE NEW YORK TIMES
“The author of THE GINGER MAN has the kind of imagination that can make almost any aspect of life a fairy tale. Taking on New York, he’s come-upon fertile ground.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“Donleavy’s best book to date and ample evidence of his staying power.”
—BOOK WORLD
“A noble book. J. P. Donleavy is among the very fine writers of his generation.”
—CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER
“Donleavy is funny, poetic and sad. A FAIRY TALE OF NEW YORK is his mordant valentine to Manhattan, a tragicomic jamboree.”
—SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER & CHRONICLE
“Donleavy is one of the leading comic writers of our day.”
—BOSTON GLOBE
“Skillfully seasoned, a willful nihilism studded with princely compensations: the honeysuckle bloom of love, the carnal whiff of sex, prancing imaginary sheikdoms, the shuffling joy of combat. It is all good Donleavy.”
—LIBRARY JOURNAL
In hardcover: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence $7.95
In paperback: A Dell/Laurel Edition $1.75
THE GINGER MAN
J. P. Donleavy
THE COMPLETE AND UNEXPURGATED EDITION
“In the person of THE GINGER MAN, Sebastian Dangerfield, Donleavy created one of the most outrageous scoundrels in contemporary fiction, a whoring, boozing young wastrel who sponges off his friends and beats his wife and girl friends. Donleavy then turns the moral universe on its head by making the reader love Dangerfield for his killer instinct, flamboyant charm, wit, flashing generosity—and above all for his wild, fierce, two-handed grab for every precious second of life.”
—TIME MAGAZINE
“No one who encounters him will forget Sebastian Dangerfield.”
—NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE
“THE GINGER MAN is a picaresque novel to stop them all. Lusty, violent, wildly funny, it is a rigadoon of rascality, a bawled-out comic song of sex.”
—Dorothy Parker, in ESQUIRE
“The whole novel is a wild and unpredictable outburst.”
—SATURDAY REVIEW
First published in Paris in 1955. An expurgated edition appeared in England in 1956 and in the United States in 1958. The complete and unexpurgated edition was brought out in England in 1963 and in the United States by Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence in 1965.
In hardcover: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence $7.95
In paperback: A Delta Book $1.95 A Dell/Laurel Edition $1.25
THE ONION EATERS
J. P. Donleavy
“THE ONION EATERS is a major work … a brilliant, gorgeous book, and enduring literature.”
—BALTIMORE SUN
“In the best, titillating tradition of a classic ribald tale … When was the last time a novel jolted me, the last time I loved passages enough to read them aloud to strangers? It’s THE ONION EATERS by the incredible J. P. Donleavy!”
—WOMEN’S WEAR DAILY
“Beautiful and outrageous!”
—TIME
“Bawdy and tender … a prodigious work!”
—SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER & CHRONICLE
“One grand continuous round … Many writers would give their right arm for Donleavy’s strength and beauty and purpose.”
—BOSTON GLOBE
“Donleavy’s comic inventiveness runs riot … an erotic anti-hero, mad couplings with a variety of beauties, randy characters who include the most unforgettable dirty old man since de Sade … a memorable novel … Donleavy has no master in loosing a bull in the china-shop of our dull everydays!”
—CHICAGO NEWS
In hardcover: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence $7.95
In paperback: A Dell Book $1.25
THE PLAYS OF J. P. DONLEAVY
With a Preface by the Author
ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
THE GINGER MAN is preceded by an account of its Church-enforced closing in Dublin. The play was referred to by the London Daily Express as “This bawdy, blasphemous, rich, ragged, monstrous masterpiece,” and by the New Yorker as “A work of such wit and audacity in its lines, characters and action that it almost carries the production.”
Of FAIRY TALES OF NEW YORK, Mr. Donleavy’s second play, Kenneth Tynan wrote, “It has remained for J. P. Donleavy to invent a theatrical form in which the genius of the comic vignettist can flourish … a chain of theatrical pearls nourished by a master of comic dialogue. Benchley, had he lived, would have rejoiced.”
Of Mr. Donleavy’s third play, the London Times said, “A SINGULAR MAN is undoubtedly a most singular play both in what it says and in how it says it. It is also a brilliant one, painstakingly reduced from the rough, hand-cut and polished into a hundred and one facets. This modern morality is at once one of the funniest and one of the saddest plays and it will do much to reinforce Mr. Donleavy’s reputation as one of the finest and most touching comic writers of our time.”
THE SADDEST SUMMER OF SAMUEL S is based on his novella and is published here for the first time. These plays continue to be performed in many countries and languages and are fascinating blueprints of the novels on which they are based.
In hardcover: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence $10.00
In paperback: A Delta Book $2.95
A SINGULAR MAN
J. P. Donleavy
“His giant mausoleum abuilding, George Smith, the mysterious man of money, lives in a world rampant with mischief, of chiselers and cheats. Having sidestepped slowly away down the little alleys of success he tiptoes through a luxurious, lonely life between a dictatorial Negress housekeeper and two secretaries, one of which, Sally Tomson, the gay, wild and willing beauty, he falls in love with. … “George Smith is such a man as Manhattan’s subway millions have dreamed of being.”
—TIME MAGAZINE
“A SINGULAR MAN is a love story, a melodrama, an unresolved detective story, a soap opera, a vaudeville routine, and a very fine novel….”
—THE NEW YORKER
“… excruciatingly funny …”
—NEWSWEEK
“A rollicking, rambunctious novel in which a sensitive but tough-minded hero battles the evil world with a parody of its own methods … sheer pleasure to read.”
—THE NEW YORK TIMES
“… a wild romp, a funny, funny book.”
—CHICAGO TRIBUNE
“A masterpiece of writing about love.”
—THE NATIONAL OBSERVER
In hardcover: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence $7.95
In paperback: A Dell/Laurel Edition $1.50
THE UNEXPURGATED CODE
A Complete Manual of Survival & Manners
J. P. Donleavy
ILLUSTRATED WITH DRAWINGS BY THE AUTHOR
With the world a harsh cruel place and an enemy out to get you if it can, courtesy will not make you rich overnight but by degrees it makes others feel good and this in turn will make you feel even better. Currently there are a lot of sleazy people who think manners a weakness and rudeness a strength, and that the mild are doomed to be poor and the nasty destined to be richer. In the face of this reality, although there is no need to behave squalidly in the firs
t instance, it’s as well to know when to riposte, sock or sue.
With more and more folk from the wrong side of the tracks, it is important to make more room at the bottom. It is de rigueur that one should attempt to rise up at least a social class before everyone tries to shove you back down through two below. The Unexpurgated Code takes plain folk through the useful rules of social climbing, accent improvement, to throwing your first large party. Treating not only the problem of being unsocially registered while rubbing shoulders with the haughty and rich, but also the nice demeanors to sport when you reach the top.